Delphine Bedel (DB): If we think of climate change and global warming, extractivism and deforestation, Brazil is the first place that comes to mind. Both Tanya and Selo Turvo are geographically linked to indigenous populations. Today that represents 5% of the world’s population, but they’re responsible for the care of 80% of all biodiversity. The book is an extractivist product – we need natural resources, water, trees, electricity, labour, to produce them – but it’s also been for centuries, one of the ways of sharing and accessing knowledge. So there is a tension between the desire or mission to produce books, and access to local resources. João and Tanya, would you like to say a few words about the context in which you’re working?

Alix Breda & João Pedro Lima (AB & JPL): Here in Brazil, we have an issue: the huge lack and limited variety of paper. There are few local and certified offset papers, so most of them are imported, which means they’re more expensive. So printing exists as a kind of monopoly: for example, there is only one specific printing house here that has the distribution rights to certain papers, like Munken, which is a common paper used in Europe and the United States. If you want to use that paper, you are forced to print with them. And then there’s the cost: you can choose to print your book there, or you can choose to buy an apartment, because they’re almost the same price. This lack of resources is something that’s still a difficulty for us in Brazil.

Tanya Busse (TB): We’re based in Tromsø, which is 70 degrees north. We reside on the traditional lands of the Sami people, who move beyond borders, which means Norway, Northern Sweden, Northern Finland and Russia. We are a community based on the periphery, with a different set of limitations that also create new opportunities and new ways of thinking. Part of having a smaller community is also about social sustainability. We learn so much every day from the people around us, from local indigenous knowledge when it comes to environmental issues, like how to prioritise printing, production, publishing, distribution, and knowledge exchange. It’s a way of thinking against neo-colonial ways of organising the world. It’s important to us to build communities in smaller isolated places, and to learn ways in which we can grow and strengthen relationships with our environment, and also work with local resources – very often we under value local resources. We are also located in an area where you have to import everything. In large cities you have all the conveniences around you. For us, it’s about trying not to import so much, trying to create new ways of working that are more decentralised, and trying to make good choices given very limited resources.

Michelle Dunn Marsh (MDM): When we think about the definitions of sustainability, and the idea of harvesting responsibly, not depleting our resources, we also think about making books that can last, about the audiences that own these books, about the workers and their happiness and their skill set. But there are also the realities of cost. With historical illuminated manuscripts, it would take about 30 sheep to make a single book: that was expensive, and so books were precious. While books are incredibly desirable, do we still think of them as precious? What currency exchange are we willing to place on them? And how does that affect access?

Emily Sheffer (ES): I’m not working with large scale printers, so I’m not getting printing bills that are $30-60,000, which I know is the reality for a lot of offset books in the USA. I’m working with very small scale inkjet coated papers. So I’m buying boxes of 25 sheets to make a couple of books. I think of my books almost as tactile sculptural objects, so I am very conscious of the paper that I’m using and how it feels and how it looks. Unfortunately, a lot of beautiful paper that I love comes from Japan, and I’m on the east coast of the United States. So I am working under different guidelines for how I print my books, but I am thinking about all the same things. 

DB: In English, in its etymology, publishing means ‘making things public’. At one time, that meant someone going through the street and shouting the news. So through the act of publishing, you actually create an audience, you create a community. I see a lot of very broad questions in the chat about sustainability, and what should be encompassed and taken into account in this conversation. Michelle, your production model involves the audience directly as co-publishers. And Tanya, you were mentioning that working locally versus globally presents challenges in terms of access to resources, and in terms of the sharing of knowledge and the community you’re trying to build around publishing, to highlight and give space to narratives that have been erased or marginalised. I’m curious to hear more about how you make this happen.

MDM: It really came from looking at projects that were not moving forward into traditional publishing environments. After 2008, shifts and changes and the rise of on demand printing brought a lot of people into publishing, so I started to think about the audience and how we help them to understand that actually, they are essential to the publishing of a book. If they aren’t buying books, people are not going to continue making books; we need to keep this ecosystem and cycle functioning, so we invited people to pre-purchase and become a part of the process. If we pre-sold 500 copies up front at $50 each, we’d achieved our goal of $25,000 to edit, design, solicit a writer and offset print a quality hardcover book. We were starting at zero from a profit perspective, but we could cover the cost of making the book. It felt important to me that the public understood the significance of their engagement – seeing their name in the book created a kind of ownership. When the first book came out, Conor Risch from Photo District News, a magazine that is sadly no longer with us, said that at first when he heard our concept he wasn’t sure if he’d like the look of all the names. But later said, ‘to see all these names, some of which I know, some of which I don’t know, it’s a record that is very powerful.’

DB: Tanya, you mentioned that the next edition of the touring Arctic Art Book Fair will be in two years in Greenland. That’s also a very unique model in a region that has been considered for decades as being more stable politically, but now it’s extremely volatile. So I’m also interested to hear more about the travelling geographies that you are trying to create through the book fair.

TB: The book fair includes quite a bit of research in terms of mapping, trying to understand what has come before, in terms of who had the power to publish, which publishing houses and technologies were they using, what was available at the time. A lot of it has been centred around Norwegian publishing and publishing houses. So I started to look in the North, particularly in northern Norway, trying to map out small scale Sami publishers, which are mostly literature based, creating a cartography or an understanding of what is being made now. The book fair is building knowledge around historical publishing in the circumpolar North: not only in Northern Norway, but also in different areas like Greenland, which was under Danish colonial rule. This created a strong allyship between Northern Norway and the indigenous northern communities in Greenland. But it’s also quite challenging to take steps to make something nomadic or mobile. The first one, which was based locally, went very well, but we’re very aware that we have to feel a need from another community that they would like to co-host this with us, so that we’re not parachuting in and imposing some idea of what a book fair should be. There’s a very rich publishing history in Greenland, and also a literary scene, an art scene; it’s very vibrant, and politically active. There was a very strong response, and had we not got that response, maybe we would rethink where the next one would be. But there seems to be a kind of desire from our partners there to continue with it, and to explore it as a way of binding partnerships.

MDM: In the US, we have a lot of artists from underrepresented backgrounds who are now getting more attention, but curators, publishers, and other parts of the photography ecosystem are still fairly homogenous in terms of ethnic backgrounds, cultural experiences, and education. I am a first generation American woman of mixed ethnicity, yet I also went to Bard College, as did many of my colleagues in publishing. So I’m often thinking about ways that we can continue to bring in different ways of storytelling. When I’m working with Indigenous artists, or working with Black artists, or working with women, or working with LGBTQ artists, I’m aware of my own identity perspectives, and theirs, when I speak with them about their work, and we decide together what is important to share. A prime example is Adrian Burrell’s book, that we just released in February. It’s been very well received by a Black American audience because they understand nuanced elements in his storytelling. We decided not to over explain ‘what the work is about’ because we wanted to privilege the audience that it was really intended for. Sometimes those decisions become very important in speaking authentically to a specific audience beyond the people that actually own the book. Most of our books include a text by someone other than the artists. But sometimes the artist’s voice is enough. Selena Kearney, who is Chehalis, made work about Native American stereotypes: she’s looking at cheap appropriation of sacred symbols and human representation in sports jerseys, Halloween costumes, and “souvenirs” within mainstream culture. We invited a number of people to write about it, yet it was challenging work to an otherwise “culturally positive” moment, so no-one chose to. We made the decision to publish the book anyway.

DB: I have been teaching publishing for about 15 years, and I started all the classes with this question, is your book worth cutting trees? This is a provocation but also a reality. By this I mean, what’s the urgency of the project? Does it have to exist in this form? Should it be a book? Should it be a performance? Could it be a poem? Could it exist in any other kind of way? And when we talk about extractivism, and scarcity of resources, where do we stand now? I ended up closing my publishing house. But I’m curious to hear if someone wants to pick up on this challenging question: how do you see the future of your practice, the role of books in circulation of knowledge and also, as a way of highlighting marginalised narratives?

MDM: When I was working at other publishing houses, we were producing 25 to 30 books a year. Through Minor Matters I’ve produced 30 books in a decade. I feel very aware that we are in a rich time of publishing, that there are a lot of pieces of printed matter being created. And I’m curious about not only the economics of selling, that is one element. But also, how else are those books moving forward into the public? Books that are being subsidised financially are actually being sold for the same price point as other books. Why aren’t some of those funded books just being given away? During the pandemic, I took 100 new copies of a selection of our books to the local grocery store, and asked the manager to give them to the workers. They were so surprised. A lot of people not engaged in the arts will never spend $50 for a book: that’s a shirt, that’s a meal, that’s petrol, or fulfils other interests like sports or music. So how do we open up that audience to beauty, ideas, craft in books? To wanting to own them? For me, it’s a constant question of how long do we continue to do this? Is there still a need? 

AB & JPL: Something that’s very difficult for us to balance here is that the books are very expensive to make. We don’t really have a lot of public funding for the arts here, especially the last two years where the government was in a shambles. Most of the time, we are taking money from our own pockets to make books, so I think it’s really important that publishers think about who the audience is that we’re trying to reach, and about ways of creating this community distribution. I think that’s the only way that we’re actually going to make books circulate, at least for us. At Selo Turvo we always separate a percentage of the copies of our books to be donated to libraries, not only in Brazil, but also in South America, which I think is really important, collectively.

ES: I teach, and the first thing that I know in my heart as an artist is that artists make things, that’s what we do. So that’s why this conversation is so important, to figure out what are the most responsible ways to make and gain an audience. I teach my students the importance of the physical art object, so not looking at things on screens, but looking at things on paper and having photographs that you can touch. Making books that you can hold is a huge part of my curriculum.

DB: There is this tension also of censorship, of books being withdrawn from libraries, especially in the US. I research feminist publishing; in particular in France, we see that, from the invention of the Gutenberg press [Germany, 1440], to the laws that govern freedom of the press,* it was forbidden for women to be a printer, librarian or publisher, at the risk of their own life. We sometimes take for granted the fact that we can publish, but in many parts of the world, it’s impossible. So it still remains a privilege to access any form of publishing. I know artists who make books in one copy, because that’s enough, and create specific conditions to view that one copy because of the context. I’d be curious to hear more from João and Alix, about the kinds of networks of artists and publishers that are created in South America and how you see these questions.

AB & JPL: Here in Brazil, at least at all the festivals and book fairs that we participate in as publishers, you have an obligation to leave at least one book from your catalogue to be donated to a library. For example, Festival Imaginária has a partnership with a public library in a place called Parelheiros, which is a neighbourhood here in São Paulo that has the second largest favela. Because most of the events and distribution of art books are still very centralised in specific areas in the city, it’s really important for us as consumers, and also bookmakers, to extend this range of distribution and open our audience. I feel like we cannot call a book sustainable or eco-aware if it remains circulating in this very tiny group of people, because at least here, the photobook community is still a very small niche group of mostly rich people. We need to circulate books in marginalised areas, and we need books to leave this centralised area and go out into the world. 

MDM: There are other opportunities: for instance, Emily’s going to be at the New York Art Book Fair, I’m going to be at the AIPAD photography fair, and if I have five of your books, I will take them there. There are ways we can start small, where we do an exchange and see what happens. This is how publishing, certainly in photography, has worked for a very long time. Sometimes we have to go back to some old and simple methods.

DB: I have some numbers here: for instance, in the US the publishing industry uses 32 million trees annually to make books. And a huge percentage of the books that are produced are being pulped, and the pulp is thrown away in landfill. So I think we need to question so-called vanity publishing, or self-publishing. Initially it was more to bypass gatekeepers, but it’s now become a need to have a photobook in order to start a career. It’s a whole ecosystem that we also need to think about. What is career making, what is exhibition making, the kind of resources and strategies we use, the kind of material we use. It’s a much more complex conversation to have, and I think tonight’s panel is a first step in mapping different geographies and strategies, and the local versus global. These are very urgent and necessary questions.

MDM: One of the challenges that we see with our publishing model is knowing where there is demand. We published a book about music photography, and sold 500 copies in a matter of hours. Other books on climate change and other topics take three months, or do not reach their minimum audience at all. What we are interested in, and what we consider important, is not always where the audience’s interest lies. That’s painful for us, but there are realities to face. I said many years ago that I’m not always sure that everyone deserves a photography book, which was a very controversial statement. I’ve also worked for many photographers who made one book in 40 years, one that spoke to their career, and those are extraordinary and important publications. We live in a different time now. I think that there are some good parts to anyone getting published, but it also raises some complex questions. It really goes back to the historical notion of a book as a sacred object. We have not found another way of creating the same feeling in our hearts as when we hold a book with our work in it. If we want artists to feel affirmed, if we want them to progress in their academic careers, in their professional careers, the externally-published book has held this kind of place. Do we free that? How? Can we encourage producing five copies of a book and assure someone that it is valid and important and meaningful? I hope so. But in my opinion, we are not quite there yet.

TB: My collaborator, and I, Emilija Škarnulytė, have a platform called New Mineral Collective, and one of the methodologies that we work with is called ‘counter prospecting’. It’s about thinking of alternative values that are needed in the world, other than gold and resources and metals. This sounds very idealistic, but I think that it’s a good starting point for imagining ways in which things could be different, ways in which we could do things differently. Sometimes they come out in speculative proposals, and sometimes they come out in real objects, so counter prospecting can kind of be applied to anything, if you think about it. It’s about imagining the world differently than where we are, where the world has led us to now, and other alternative futures that we can imagine. 

You can find out more about Selo Turvo’s approach to sustainability in the Case Study feature on Contranatura.